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Zoom, the video communications company whose name became synonymous with remote work during the pandemic, has ordered staff back to the office.
The San Francisco-based software company has told employees who live within 50 miles of one of its locations that they will have to come to the office at least two days a week.
Zoom called its new work requirements “a structured hybrid approach” that was designed to put it “in a better position to use our own technologies, continue to innovate, and support our global customers”. It added that it would “continue to leverage the entire Zoom platform to keep our employees and dispersed teams connected and working efficiently”.
Amazon and Disney are among the firms that have reduced remote work days.
Surveys suggest that workers are still holding onto the ability to work from home to some degree.
About 12% of workers in the US, where Zoom is headquartered, were fully remote in July, while another 29% had hybrid policies, according to a survey by researchers at Stanford University and others that has been conducted monthly since the pandemic.
That is similar to patterns recorded by the Office for National Statistics in the UK earlier this year.
Earlier research by the Stanford team has found remote work is more common in English-speaking countries, and far less common in Asia and Europe.
Zoom’s shares leapt 15-fold from its initial public offering price the year before the pandemic after companies turned to its easy-to-use video meetings to keep their operations ticking over when offices were forced to close. Its stock market value peaked at more than $140bn, making it the tech sector’s most visible winner from the Covid-19 crisis, before falling back more than 85 per cent as many of its customers began calling staff back to work.
Zoom has sought to turn the new hybrid work arrangements adopted by many of its customers into a new business opportunity. However, its Zoom Rooms offering — which is designed to improve the experience of online meetings involving people who are in the office with others working remotely — has not caught on with anything like the force of its original service.
The company reported revenue growth in its latest quarter of 3 per cent, a far cry from the growth of more than 400 per cent it recorded in 2020.
“I think hybrid work is going to stay,” creating a new business opportunity for the company, chief executive Eric Yuan told investors on an earnings call in May. “To let employees work anywhere has sort of become a fashion. It’s hard to force employees back.”